The Smell of Life and Death by Cornelis van DalenThe sense of morality and ethics

This
is a story of sense and perception. Human perceptions come through and
are of the senses. We consider we have only five senses, for which
there are the obvious organs: sight, taste, touch, hearing, and smell.
Closer examination will reveal an additional seven senses making the
human a being of twelve senses, but that is for a later discussion. For
now I wish to direct your attention to a big stink in the world of
science.

In May 2008, the parliamentarians of House of Commons
in London sat in judgement of proposed legislation to amend the Human
Fertilisation & Embryology Act, 1990. The content of this act and
the proposed amendments have far-reaching ethical and moral
considerations. Essentially the proposal was to allow the creation
animal-human embryos; lower the time of permissible abortions and grant
sovereignty to the donor of semen in IVF procedures when no male is
present. The parliamentary members voted not with their noses but with
their abstract minds. Not with their noses?

The media is
constantly seeking to mould your ethical outlook. Press releases from
scientific communities routinely put forward well-crafted arguments for
media publication. Provocative images of shock and horror to which we
have all become accustomed is another tried and tested method of
establishing your outlook on life. When the scientific community decide
they wish to do the unthinkable, for example on animal-human embryo
creation, they rewrite the ethics code by canvassing people’s opinion
on the matter after a period of media massaging has been undertaken.
Today ethics is consensus; morality is decency lowered to commonality.

What
are the origins of ethics and morals? Ethics and morality is one of the
most challenging dilemmas facing philosophers or pursuers of wisdom. It
is here contended that moral and ethical life is slipping into a
morass. In previous ages ethics and morality were the secret language
of the Gods, passed onto the enlightened spiritual leaders of men. This
was later enshrined in what we call religion, which in turn became the
law of the state. Now a person must come to recognise what conscience
is and so learn to live by one’s conscience in a world that is
challenging the very basis life. We need to develop a sense of morality
and an organ of moral judgement, of conscience.

The sense of smellTo
smell you have to take something in. You are not dealing with a
boundary with smell. With the sense of touch you become conscious of a
part of yourself, but this is opposite to the sense of smell. With
smell you do not run into something but have a feeling of being
overpowered, overwhelmed. When there is an odour, you cannot avoid it.
With breathing comes smell; you are forced to smell.

People
become more decent human beings through the sense of smell. Consider
the matter of hygiene – of cleanliness. ‘That’s nice’ or ‘that’s not
nice’ comes to us through the sense of smell. “The Great Stink”, as it
was called in London in 1858, occurred when the stench of human waste
being flushed into the river Thames was so great in Westminster where
Parliament sat, that it considered relocating outside of the city of
London. They draped sheets soaked in chloride of lime on the windows of
the House of Commons to sweeten the air. In the end the politicians
were forced to adopt a new law of parliament to create London’s sewer
system, which it had been postponing for many years. The new sewers
brought untold benefits to urban living – clean streets, clean drinking
water, clean houses. Epidemics, such as waterborne diseases like
cholera and typhoid, came to an end. The greatest advance in human
health and living came about through the sense of smell.

When
you are overwhelmed by smell, you lose some of your consciousness. You
cannot talk to others or perform mental work. Your whole being is
permeated by smell. To be permeated by the perfume of the rose is
elevating, to be permeated by the smell of decomposing flesh is
decidedly the opposite. The London press reported “The Great Stink”
thus: “The gentility of speech is at an end – it stinks; and whosoever
once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky
if he lives to remember it.” [1]

A nose or a snoutNo
one really asks what is the sense of smell and why dogs differ in this
ability or function. How does smelling take place and what is
perceived? This is the prime question.

There is a stupefying
effect from being in the constant presence of smell or odour. After a
few moments in a smelly room, you no longer notice it. This is very
telling of people who work in smelly places like factories, garbage
collection and so forth. Even passengers in crowded trains can’t smell
body odour any longer. In hospitals there is a pervading odour of
cleaning agents, surgical spirits, sickness and despair. But also the
smell of death!

But the sense of smell is soon neutralised by
the organ of smell – the nose. We become used to an odour. In an
enclosed space, for example, we become quickly accustomed to the smell
unless we leave the room and then re-enter.

Animals are
different here. They have a very well developed sense of smell. Dogs
for example can smell all the time, their nostrils constantly sniffing.
A dog can stand in one spot for minutes, concentrating on the symphony
of odours left by another – seemingly entranced, no doubt decoding the
message: ‘Meet me behind the garden shed, signed Blake.’ Yes, we know,
Purdey!

An animal is all nose, especially a dog. They can
smell a whole array of odours which we as humans are oblivious to. It
could be described as a whole symphony of odours. The dog can follow
any specific smell and not lose it, not tire of it, not become
oblivious to it as we do.

Smell of the sickDomesticated
dogs have been employed for various roles in life based on their
sniffing abilities: the hunt for food, the finding of the lost, as well
as tending animals and so forth. The ever-present companionship of dogs
has been part of human life for thousands of years. Someone even
suggested dogs were responsible for the civilisation of humans!

Dogs
have also been trained to detect cancer in humans. [2] The crux is that
conditions such as cancer have an odour – ‘they smell bad.’ The usual
scientific scepticism takes over, even though tests and trials with the
trained dogs showed a greater success rate in detection than high-tech
equipment costing a million pounds. Additionally, the dogs could detect
a cancerous presence before its manifestation/detection, it is
maintained.

Some practitioners of medicine do specialise in
smell. In traditional Chinese medicine there are olfactory specialists.
They smell odours and discharges, know the disease and which organ is
in disarray. They smell shoes and know what is the matter with the
owner of the shoe. In our technologically driven medical business, the
sense of smell is not given any attention in the diagnosis of the sick,
even though in a few people the sense of smell is acute and could be
developed to diagnose the illness.

The old-school family
physician was said to smell the breath when he asked the patient to say
aaaaahhhh, and not only look at the tongue, tonsils or throat. A
disease is a disorder which has a smell.

Smell and instinct With
animals the sense of smell is related to what we call instinct.
Instinct specifically utilizes smell. Animals have a direct connection
with the earth; salmon return to the same spawning river through smell
of location; an animal knows where it is born through smell. We
remember things through the eye or ear – but animals remember through
the nose.

There are two opposites: instinct and smell, on the
one hand, and intellect on the other, which has become independent from
Nature – we term this knowledge. In lower animals the nose knows all
there is to know. [3] In man this kind of instinctive knowledge has
been lost. We need to relearn with the splendid organ, the forebrain.
One notes also that in higher animals the nose becomes smaller and
smaller.

The faculty of the nose – the sense of smell – is
quite unconscious. Can we name odours that are equivalent to tastes –
bitter, salty, sweet or sour? We cannot name smells the same. We are
asleep to the sense of smell and have to make up classifications.
Either it smells good or it is bad. The bouquet of wine for example is
often related to other known smells – of herbs, fruit, and flowers and
such like. The perfume industry has linked instinct with smell – of sex
drive and attraction, but not the moral aspect. [4]

Animals know
what is good and bad through smell. With us, we relate to smell as the
foundation of morality. Without smell we could never have moral
judgement. Odour compels us to judge: ‘it stinks’, ‘I smell a rat’, and
so forth. Paradise has a definite odour; in a desire to dwell in
paradise we imagine delightful scents, as also found in temples and
incense used in churches. We do not worship in the sewers, even though
the highest things often come from manure if one considers the
alchemist’s use of manure, or the preparation of compost vital to soil
life.

Occult history tells us that originally man had as primary
organ that of smell. Man was in contact with the gods through smell.
The organ changed through evolution and the forebrain organ shrank to
its present size. In future, this will change again. The ancient
Egyptians knew that the Hierarchies of the Gods pass judgement on
humans at the time of passing through the gate of death with the sense
of smell. No other sense penetrates the sense of morality.

Man’s
moral contact with the world comes about by the sense of smell. We need
now, more than ever before, to develop the sense of smell, as we are
having a hard time with morality. Only man has a nose; in animals they
have a snout. People’s nose is characteristic of them. Your nose is
characteristic of you. In theatre and in film this fact is often used
for an actor to change themselves into another character. Historically,
a condemned person had a red nose to hide his identity and was taken in
a cart wearing a white gown to the place of execution or punishment.
The clown and red nose uses the same trick of annihilating identity.

Morals and ethics – where to now?The
way of moral judgement or instinct is through smell, but we have
forgotten why. It is like the answer ‘42’ in Douglas Adams’
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the question has been forgotten.
Our intellect has become independent from the Cosmic, the source of all
life; this is part of evolution and it entails estrangement from the
Cosmic in order to develop new faculties.

One could well say
that there is a deep cleft between the pole of natural necessity and
that of moral necessity. It is indicative of the debate before
parliament which introduced this article on the ethics of animal-human
embryos, ethics of abortions, ethics of artificial insemination (now
termed IVF), ethics of genetic modification of plants, and more, that
man has no knowledge of how the former ethical and moral position
entered his soul. Neither is he aware of the way human soul life has
been gradually de-spiritualised in the past 2000 years.

The
position this writer takes is that material science in its increasing
grasp on all matters of life, bring the higher senses of ethics and
morality into a destructive influence on all of life, because science
does not form a bridge to the higher conception of life. Man has to
develop new sense organ based on morality – an individual morality, a
conscience which is smell as a higher organ.

Endnotes:1. As quoted in ‘The big stench that saved London,’ by Paul Simons, The Times, London. June 17, 20082. The Sunday Times November 6, 2005.3. One can hardly hide the etymology of nose and knows!4.
There may be disagreement here: if asked to described the smell of a
rose, one would call it sweet, delicate, and then perhaps lemony, rich,
heady; in the same way as the taste of food, e.g. raspberry – sweet
with a dash of sour, etc. but in both cases there are equivalent
limitations in describing the full reality.

References:Dr Albert Soesman, The Twelve Senses, Wellsprings of the Soul, Hawthorn Press, UK. 1990Rudolf Steiner, Man as a Being of Sense and Perception, Steiner Book Centre, Canada. 1981